Ending the Covid Public Health Emergency is actually bad news as there are insufficient provisions to maintain benefits received during the emergency period with persistence of problems from Covid.
The end of a government declared emergency doesn't *have* to be bad. Generally speaking if the problem is ongoing you would want the government to end the emergency phase when they have a plan for an ongoing response in place.
The real problem here is the government seems to just be washing their hands of it. They're pretending it's gone because there's virtually zero testing anymore, and so as the "cases" go down the deaths have to follow(can't die of COVID if no one tested you for COVID). I think one of the biggest problems at this point is that people keep reporting case and death numbers, comparing them to previous years, as if they mean anything at all. They don't.
@skua @BE We would use hospitalizations and death counts well before we'd use excess death figures. Hospitalizations lag behind an increase in cases by about a week and deaths can lag a few weeks later. Of course these figures would all be undercounts, but could still be warning signs. Whether people would pay attention is a different matter. Analysis of excess deaths would come at some time down the road to tell us how much of an undercount the official numbers were.
@rchusid @BE
When Covid hospital and death counts stop being issued then we'd be using lagging excess death figures.
AIUI some countries have stopped issueing counts already.
Are they even collecting the data?
And even in the US, "After April 30, 2024, hospitals participating in federal programs will no longer be required to report data on things such as COVID-19 admissions and deaths"
www.factcheck.org/2023/05/scicheck-qampa-on-the-end-of-the-covid-19-public-health-emergency/
Yeah, our local hospitals have all, very vocally and proudly I should say, stopped testing for and reporting COVID at all. There's, officially, been zero COVID deaths in my county of over 200,000 people for at least 8 months now. The last reported COVID death that I can find is August 31st, 2022. Obviously that's because that's when they stopped testing and collecting the data.
There's already zero data locally for me and I suspect that will be the case for many more people soon.
It's always a mystery....
@BE Exactly--the problem is that they did not do enough to make needed measures long term and therefore so much ends by ending the emergency. The emergency period should have been used more to set up long term plans.